Tuesday, July 22, 2014

So, one of the main complaints leveled at Photosphere is that the image quality wasn't sharp enough. To be fair this was sort of true -- we were forced to scale the texture down to whatever the hardware supported.

This update changes that. If the image is too large for the device's 3D hardware, we now segment it into up to 8 pieces, each one able to be up to that maximum width. In practice this means you should be able to use a ridiculous 16k wide Photosphere on a lot of devices.

This also eats up massive amounts of RAM, possibly, so at the same time when we store the image we're now compressing it via ETC1. This takes a bit but means that despite supporting much larger images, it should use less ram at the same time. It's a win/win really, assuming that brief wait doesn't kill you.

This is a modest update that adds some more variation to the fireworks, adding some additional random types of streaks and dots, different variations on the type of glow, and more. It also adds more colors to the available list, particularly strong bold colors.

Additionally, there's one more type of firework to enable in the list, called Heavy Ring. This adds more, larger, particles to the standard ring type and hangs round longer besides. It has a tight white spot with a wide glow.